Cutting seven goals to three

The problem

The company had found its market and planned to triple revenue. Asked for his top five goals for the year, the CEO listed six, then remembered a seventh. None were ranked. Two pre-offsite surveys named the same top blocker: prioritization. Five of twelve people asked leadership to start prioritizing, and four wanted to stop treating everything as urgent. Asked for one word to describe the culture, the CEO said "survival."

The root cause

The goals were real, but they lived in one person's head, unranked and not shared, so each function worked toward a different one. With no ranked list and no way to turn goals into owned work, "urgent" was the only prioritization signal the company had. It bought one-off exceptions that added complexity and left no time for the fixes that would have prevented them.

What we did

A four-day offsite, phones in a box. Two anonymous surveys, answered by most of the team, meant the room opened with the team's own words rather than the CEO's.

Seven goals came down to three, the number a team can actually carry. All three had to sit on the real bottleneck, which was collections, not the thirty AI agents on the wish list. A key result reading "test 10–30 agents" was struck out and rewritten as three agent workflows: deal desk, close, and collect.

"We've really gone from survival to thrival. I don't look at the bank balance every week and think, what's gonna happen next week."The CEO, six months later